


The eighth day

by Gabriel4Sam



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Divergence - Star Wars: A New Hope, F/M, Fix-It, Post-Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Time Loop, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:00:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28288845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gabriel4Sam/pseuds/Gabriel4Sam
Summary: Asajj likes to believe she's smart. Or, well, smarter that when she let the Dark enslaves her.So, when the Force shifts time for her, offering her the same day again and again, Asajj listens. She listens, she learns, she plans.And then she strikes.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Asajj Ventress
Comments: 3
Kudos: 80





	The eighth day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TexasDreamer01](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TexasDreamer01/gifts).



Asajj is busy inside the motors of her ship when it happens. The little beast roars like no other and can outlast the most determined other bounty hunter, or idiotic imperial, but fickle is a too nice word for it. Half of her money is spent on pieces.

So, here she is, oil on her arms and a swear on her lips when something explodes in the Force. It’s so ferocious and intense that she bashes her head on metal so hard she probably gives herself a concussion, then only has the time to reach for the bucket full of oil she just used to bath a recalcitrant butterfly valve and she’s violently ill.

She reaches into the Force with wobbly intent and is meet with weeping and distress. Something monstrous just happened.

Once before, once only, Asajj sensed such lament, just after Order 66, when the Force mourned Its children. Only, there are no more Jedi to genocide, the Inquisitors, Vader and bounty hunters took care of it. But not Asajj, never Asajj, those bounties, she never took, even if she refused to examine the reason why. But today, the Force had been shaken in a very similar way. What sort of horrors could have been so terrible to be felt this way?

The answer is on the Holonet only minutes after. The Empire really wants people to know about its new toy, this planet killer born of a nightmare.

A whole world. Alderaan is no more, Alderaan of the shining culture, of the precious beauty, Alderaan with its poetry, with its literature, its theatre and songs and food, with its ideas and its history. Alderaan, the world who fought so hard, always, for the disenfranchised, for the slaves, for the forgotten. Alderaan, who always opened its doors to refugee and voted following its heart in the Senate, its Senators the last bastions of resistance in a sea of sycophants.

Alderaan and its millions of sentients, and its billions of life force.

Asajj feels very old and very tired. If she was the sort of self-righteous idiot prone to this sort of gesture, she would probably search and join for the Rebel Alliance on the spot, but she’s smarter than that.

That night, she still buys herself a very, very nice vintage, quite decided to drink herself into stupor. Sometimes, that’s the only thing to do, if not done too often. She’s in that dangerous state for a Force User, not passed out but drunk enough her control on her powers is not the same, her shields not so tights, when she feels the Light flares. She reaches out, more reflex than decision.

“Ventress!” Someone calls in the void, surprised to feel someone reaching out, and the voice brings back memories of a taunting smile and grey eye and then it’s snuffed out.

Asajj sits up, terribly sober. Wherever he was, Obi-Wan Kenobi just died. In any other time, she wouldn’t have feel it, but tonight, drunk and tired, and with so little Force sensitive beings left. She never liked the guy but to her surprise, she feels a wave of grief. She almost reaches for the bottle again, but decides against it. This night, her dreams are plagued by memories and she sleeps so poorly that the next morning, she doesn’t question it when the ship’s hyper drive acts out again. Exasperated, she opens the compartment, searches for the reason of the problem….By the Force, how much did the resonance in the Force of Alderaan’s blowing up affect her? She would have sworn she had done a better job than that, it’s exactly like…. She needs a holiday. Something safe and quiet and far, very far away from the Empire blowing up entire worlds and killing old enemies who were of the last people in the whole galaxy who knew, really knew Asajj. Because it was certainly the Empire: Obi-Wan Kenobi wasn’t exactly the style to die from anything else than a full legion, or at least a full Sith. She’s there in her memories, thinking of that time on Drall when she had tried to cut him in two with an ancient Sith Weapon, and that time on Selonia when Kenobi had foiled her whole plan by, she was quite sure of it, seducing the twin ambassadors… Strangely; all those occasions who had infuriated her at the time are now bringing a half-smile on her pale lips. He had been a ferocious adversary, but a fun one. And it would be a lie to pretend, but only now, now that he was dead, that she had never imagined what sort of adversary he would have made on another battlefield, one of linen and pillows. She’s there, working on the butterfly valve and thinking of twinkling grey eyes, when the Force explodes in pain. Asajj bashes her head on metal, again.

What the…. This time, she doesn’t throw up, breathing careful, sending her pain into the Force.

Not even ten minutes after, the fate of Alderaan is on the holonet again.

Asajj needs to sit down. Didn’t she live that already? A vision, perhaps? No, her visions are rare, fragmented, honestly not very useful, her talents in the Force residing elsewhere. Quickly, she puts her motor in order and starts her ship.

Asajj Ventress is a lot of things but indecisive is not one of them. Run away? Where? If it’s the will of the Force, running away in the Unknown regions themselves would be useless. The Force can’t be outrun and if Its paths can be mysterious, they are stubborn.

Direction Alderaan, or whatever is left of it. Here, perhaps she will find answers. She’s just leaving hyperspace when she feels the Light flares up, once again. Much more closely, she can almost taste the last breath of Kenobi, feel the lightsaber and something…something strange and powerful and like a note in the music of the universe she never heard before.

Even dying, Kenobi can’t do it simply, the overachiever flirt that he is.

This time, it isn’t sleep which makes Asajj leaves this day. This time, it’s the Empire which destroy her little ship, because she had no chance against a Star Destroyer.

The next day, Asajj doesn’t bash her head on metal hull. That day, her ship is already in the system when the Death Star arrives and here she waits, almost in ambush except she has no intention to reveal her presence, all the powers on her ship on shielding it, and too small fry to interest them , ready to collect all information she can.

She sees the destruction of Alderaan in direct and it’s even more terrible on her nerves like that, the Force howling.

And then…then, she feels Kenobi, in a garbage ship. Kneeling on her bunk, she shields herself and she follows him, letting the all she can collect itself in her mind, the useful and the useless, letting it settle, like organic matter in a swamp. When he dies, again, she reaches for him, letting her presence be a last comfort to his light.

Seven days, Asajj does nothing more than arrive before the Death Star, shudder in deep horror for Alderaan and let the fate of Kenobi, every step he takes on that damn space station, enlighten her about the forces in presence.

Before, when she was the Count’s apprentice, she never would have found the patience. She would have raged and yelled and stormed, and probably died even before Kenobi! Now, she knows better. Sometimes, she would swear she can see, at the corner of her vision, her former Master, the first one, the dead one, the Jedi, almost there, almost real, but when she turns, it’s always empty. But she feels it, as she kneels for the entire day, deep in meditation, learning that horrible space station, feeling the lives on board, she feels her dead Master, right there, and he’s so proud a younger Asajj would cry.

So, Asajj learns and Asajj plans, and Asajj thinks to run, but never does. Whatever the Force wants of her, it’s important, too important. Every morning, she jumps from her bunk and goes to repair her motor; to arrive on in the Alderaan system first. She never even checks the date. Now that the Force had put things in motion, It wouldn’t stupidly let time pass normally for Asajj.

Seven days, she waits. She learns. She meditates. Seven days, she reaches for a dying man, and feels him reaching out, sending him comfort. She never need to send peace. Obi-Wan Kenobi dies in peace, like only a Jedi could.

The eighth day, she strikes.

*************************************************************************

When Obi-Wan, Luke, and their pilots arrive on Alderaan, the whole planet is quite busy panicking, in the very polite way they have about it on this world. The old Jedi find Bail and Breha waiting for him the moment he put foot on their soil, and a monstrous blasphemy in the Force high in their sky.

“It arrived hours before you,” the Vice-Roy explains, “and no tentative of contact of our part has been successful. We have been prepping evacuation, but how be sure that any ship leaving the planet won’t be attacked? And there will never be enough ships” At this moment, a technician calls for them and at they move to the holotransmetter, Bail adds quietly, just for Obi-Wan “And we lost contact with Leia’s ship almost three days ago.”

Obi-Wan’s hand claps on his old friend’ shoulder: “She’s alive,” he swears, “I would have felt it in the Force.”

They meet around the holotransmitter and that’s the moment the whole galaxy flickers, like a flame hesitating before going out and continuing….and then it changes and takes a better path. If not an easier one, perhaps simply one with less death. And that’s how it starts, with two scoundrels, one of them quite hairy, one Jedi, two royals and a moisture farmer powerful in the Force, congregating around a blue image of a former Sith, who looks exhausted and a little manic.

“They’re quite busy with me,” she says, “And I have made as much damages to important electronical stuff as I could, so it’s time to board this horror while they’re busy trying to open the command control room to kill me”.

“Ventress?” Obi-Wan asks, after a second of silence.

“Yeah, yeah, Ventress. Don’t tell me I have changed so much, I would be crossed with you, I mean, have you seen yourself? If I hadn’t feel you in the Force, I would never have recognized you. Why have you aged forty years in twenty?”

“Is this a dead body?” Breha interrupted, her gaze fixated on something at Ventress’s feet.

“I have decapitated a Grand Moff,” Ventress admitted, like she was saying space was cold and water wet, “And honestly, someone should have done it long ago.” Her attention was taken by something outside the view of the holotransmitter. “I barricaded myself into Tarkin’s central command, I think it was made in case the space station was boarded by hostiles. But Vader is there, so, you have thirty minutes to help, or it will have all been for nothing, for me and for the young princess in the cells.”

“We’re losing communication,” the Alderaani technician intervened, “someone in the space station understood she was talking to us.”

“I will guide y-“ Ventress had the time to say, then nothing more.

Chewbacca had just the time to extend his arm to stop Obi-Wan from falling.

“Oh.” The Jedi simply said, “ _Oh._ That’s what she meant.”

For the old man, the sensation of Ventress reaching out in the Force was like something long forgotten. Like they had done that already, before, at their most dire times. He was pretty sure he had never reached out into the Force to her, but in that moment…in that moment, it was like coming home, their two Force presences responding to each other, and here, in his mind, Ventress knew just how take the abomination in the sky with minimal blood loss, like she had studied the plans of the Death Star quite extensively, like she understood the thing in and out, and knew what a small determined commando could do, now that she had temporarily blinded the Death Star. 

The rest was quite a busy day. The rest, as Han Solo would say later, was history and he would always be proud to have been there, to the first Death Star battle, when the Alderaan security forces had crept into the Death Star, using the mess Ventress had made. Honestly, he probably wouldn’t have been, if Chewie hadn’t insisted. But he saw history, that day, he saw what a small, determined group of people could do, he saw the impossible fight between Vader, Kenobi and Ventress, and the fall of a giant in the Force.

At the end of the day, Alderaan had won a moon, who would stay there, manned by the Rebel Alliance, as a warning to Star Destroyers who would come knocking. They would never use it on a planet, of course, but the Empire would never win it back and the Rebel Alliance had a new base.

At the end of the day, Asajj Ventress and Obi-Wan Kenobi would try to unravel their Force presences, with no success. “I suppose I could do worse than you,” Asajj would admit, when their third try had sent them directly to bed, because there was a limit of the closeness in the Force two Force sensistives could feel before things started to get physical.

At the end of the day, once all was done, which meant it was closer to the dawn of the next day, Asajj would finally meet the Princess, the one who had started everything, and that she had only peripherally felt in the Force before. She would understand, then, the feeling of her dead Jedi Master in the Force, this sort of giddy joy. “Well met, Padawan”, were the first words of Asajj to the young woman.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr, under the same username, come and say hi!


End file.
